Taste Test, Edition #12: Old Sea Brigade, Glo Stars, Drops of Indigo & more

Welcome to Taste Test, a review wrangling of SubmitHub-only gemstones.

“Change of Pace” by Andy Frasco & the U.N.

Life comes at you in sharply frigid waves sometimes. And it’s OK to escape and run away. Americana bluesman Andy Frasco, fronting his Andy Frasco & the U.N., a galloping, gospel-geared band of down-home players, jumps out of the rat race with a cool demeanor. “Change of Pace” clicks along at a feverish tempo, soaked in brassy horns, saloon-style piano and a glistening, deeply purposeful message of reclaiming one’s dignity and happiness in this life. The Friday night barn-burner crescendoes into a frantic and altogether revival-scorched baptismal that feels truly replenishing. “Let’s a start a movement,” Frasco guides in his soothing little way.

“I Tried” by Hanita Bhambri

The relentless but calming trickle of production washes down the skin. Hanita Bhambri’s voice drags around the weight of the world, which has since fallen from her shoulders down at her feet, and you feel each striking ache in her bones, busting and tearing through the seams of her heart. “I Tried,” curdled with piano and rhythmically off-kilter production, is a confessional of the highest order. And Bhambri’s performance is effectively nuanced and fragile and not of this world. “I guess it was not meant to be,” she mourns as she both exposes her wounds and wraps them tighter in fresh bandages.

“Sinkhole” by Old Sea Brigade

“Nothing really matters when you want it to stop,” Ben Cramer unzips with his ambient new single “Sinkhole,” a cut from his forthcoming new record, Ode to a Friend, out very early in the new year. Guitar and heart palpitations pierce through the crystalline encasing, his voice fluttering in masterfully caramel inflections. There’s an overwhelming gummy glob of yearning that gets stuck in his throat, and as the piano clashes like waves off the jagged rock, set forth with the foamy, magnetizing arrangement, pieces are torn and scattered to the four corners of the world. Cramer wears his heart on his sleeve as an emblem of unmistakable pain and tragedy. “I was wrong about you…” he casts a net into the ether, forever lost.

“Guess I’m Doing Fine” by Glo Stars

The guitar bites hard, drawing blood, and the drums (coordinated by band mate Peter Jenkins) thrash around in ferocious movements that heighten the song’s genetically chaotic makeup. Josh Grablowski’s vocal is marvelously unhinged, practically violent in colorful extremes that spring so tremendously and vigorously outside of the lines. The Nashville duo break every single rule in the psyche-rock handbook with expectedly subversive side-swipes, tearing down the establishment every note and fiery lyric at a time, and “Guess I’m Doing Fine” is as flammable as you might expect. As a cut from their self-titled debut album, Glo Stars vow to set the universe ablaze, and they do so in devious and spellbinding ways.

“Golden Lady” by Subterranean Street Society

You can liken alcoholism to a deadly snake winding and spitting venom in the desert. Louis Puggaard Müller knows all about such a creature, as he recollects such a brush with consequences on a new song. “Golden Lady,” lifted from the band’s upcoming concept album 12 Steps, which deals in substance abuse and its crippling aftereffects on relationships, bends around the light in fractured, ragged breaths. Equipped with only a lonesome electric guitar, Müller lets every ounce of pain out of his chest and float up to the sun’s outer sphere to be charred and destroyed forever. And in a way, that’s the only way he could possibly finally let go and cope. “So cheers to you,” he sings on the final stanza, a tribute that is downright devastating.

“Days of Grace” by Drops of Indigo

It’s so easy to get caught up in the frivolous and fleeting of this world⏤ and in turn, lamenting for the things you lack and envying greener pastures. Swedish folk duo Drops of Indigo unclench their fists around the physical and make a conscious decision to revel in the beauty that’s already right before them. “I guess it’s better to appreciate what I’ve got,” the feathered vocalists warble, a unifying charm rising into the twilight. The production is warm and enveloping like a cup of warm cocoa on a bluster winter morn.

“My Way” by Nicky Romero featuring Alice Berg

A broken heart is, perhaps, the most universal of tragedies. And it can come in a plethora of forms, molding our raw emotions like a slab of clay into figurines we may not even recognize anymore. Nicky Romero’s beats drop hard and fast onto glittering concrete, priming for Alice Berg’s pristine voice to fall into the cracks. Distortions and vocal tricks billow out like smoke clouds, and “My Way” ebbs and flows in invigorating gusts. To be sure, it’s a rave-ready rebound, darting between lush synths and confetti showering down from the ceiling. “All I know is that it’s my way,” Berg coos.

“For the Rush” by Daniel Blake

Age is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you’ve got the trippy buzz of incomparable wisdom to guide your ever-wavering hand in this tragic, ruinous world. But on the other, an unease creeps into your bones and the recklessness you once basked in and drew unto your chest falls away like cracked, peeling wallpaper. Daniel Blake scribbles circles around his younger days, underlining the moments that made him feel truly alive, as trinkets to return to in his waning adulthood. “It’s been three since you moved on,” he remembers of a time-faded lover, whose visage trembles further out of focus.

“Struggling to Sleep” by Infinite Fade Out featuring Gina Ellen

When your body is stricken with insomnia, or you simply are prey to your own restless night in the midnight hours, you replay would-haves, could-haves and should-haves like a weathered home video. Images are projected up on your mental screen, a hollowness drowning out your speech. Gina Ellen attempts to scream into the blackness that hangs like delicate planetary orbs above her head. “Struggling to Sleep” is a dreamy, melancholic prayer to a lover whose actions shattered her into a million pieces. “You used to say you loved me right back at the start,” she sings, her tears the framework alongside the guitar’s equally calamitous tantrums.

“Slip Away” by Marlene Oak

“Take my hand / Don’t be afraid,” soul-pop singer Marlene Oak urges on her new single “Slip Away,” which somehow defies genre but lands at the crossroads of blues and rock so effortlessly. In reflecting upon the current state of the world and her own exhaustive day-to-day routine, she pledges to, well, slip away from the racket for just a few minutes of blissful silence and intimacy. The electric guitar bobs to and fro, as if flying away on the breeze and into some unknown, and Oak is weary but hopeful. “Just for awhile / We can go someplace,” she determines.

“Troubleshooting” by The Chimps

At the most basic level, there is something mechanical about romantic entanglements. Jesse Irwin (guitar, vocals), John Krane (guitar, vocals) and Dave Werner (bass, vocals) of The Chimps consider the brunt weight and methodology of a broken heart to tearing a computer desktop apart. “Just trying turning me on…and off,” the vocal Americana trio sing, a tattered patchwork of past grievances informing the heaviness of their harmonies, intertwining with frayed ends into a much swarthier strand. “Troubleshooting” is buried beneath layers of strings, but it somehow bubbles ever-skyward into the heavens and becoming almost celestial in nature.

Follow B-Sides & Badlands on our socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram